What Fairy Tales Know About Real Life

I don't know about you, but I think fairy tales often get underestimated.

They're filed away as children's entertainment. Charming, simple, suitable for bedtime. Every now and then, they get dug out to appease the request of a child or to dazzle a group of children in a reading circle at the library.

But personally, I see fairy tales enduring because they're built on something true. Not literally true, obviously. But they map onto real experience and land somewhere deeper. Somewhere our hearts simply recognize. It's why the same core stories keep resurfacing in new forms across generations and cultures.

And it's why I decided to try my hand at retelling a few of them. Magic of the Swan is the first.

What Fairy Tales Carry That Other Stories Don't

Fairy tales deal in archetypes, which means they deal in the most compressed and universal version of human experience.

• The curse that distorts reality and makes the true thing appear false.
• The quest that requires more than the hero initially has to give.
• The love that is tested by the willingness to see clearly when everything conspires against clarity.
• The transformation that costs something real before it gives something back.

These are not just plot devices. They're descriptions of actual human experience, rendered in a form that makes them visible and survivable and meaningful. The person reading a fairy tale about a curse isn't just reading about a magical enchantment. They're reading about every situation in their own life where the true thing has been obscured by something false, where they've had to fight to see clearly through distortion. The story gives that experience a shape, and giving something a shape makes it possible to hold.

That's what good stories do, and fairy tales have been doing it longer than almost any other narrative form we have.

What Faith Sees in Them

When I read fairy tales through the lens of my faith, I find something that looks more like deep pattern.

• Darkness
• Testing
• Transformation
• Restoration

The structure of so many classic fairy tales highlights the idea that things are not as they should be. That something real and valuable can be hidden or distorted or put under a kind of curse. That love willing to pay a real cost has power that other things don't. That restoration is possible even after what seems like an irreversible ending.

I don't think fairy tales are secretly Christian, but I do think they're tapping into something true about the human experience. And the resonance between that and faith is part of what makes both so enduring.

When I write fairy tale retellings, I'm going to do my best to follow the truth that's already present in the original and ask where it leads when you follow it all the way. There may or may not be an overt faith element, but the stories will come from the shared foundation of faith along with the human experience borne of a Creator.

Fairy tales know things. They've always known things. I'm just trying to put my own little spin on them.

Is there a specific fairy tale that has always felt real to you? Something in the tale that resonated beyond the surface of the story? Which one, and what did it touch in you? I'd love to hear about it.

The Mastermind Effect: Why Brainstorming Partners Are Essential

This post is geared more toward those in the Creatives category. You know who you are. Ideas buzz in your mind at all hours of the day and night, and you're constantly looking for things or thinking outside the box at any given situation. If you're a creative person, you already know the particular loneliness of having a mind that won't quiet down.

• The ideas that arrive at eleven o'clock at night when you should be sleeping.
• The project that's been living in the back of your thoughts for months, half-formed and insistent, waiting for the right conditions to become something real.
• The vision you can see clearly from the inside but struggle to explain to people who don't naturally think the way you do.

Creative minds are a gift. They're also, at times, an isolating one.

Over the years of working in a creative field, I've discovered that the ideas themselves are rarely the problem. Most creative people have more ideas than they'll ever have time to execute. The challenge is finding that small, trusted circle of people who can help you see what you're actually building, ask the questions that move you forward, and tell you the truth when something isn't working yet. That makes an enormous difference!

You may have heard this called a mastermind group. I much prefer the phrase finding your people.

Why General Community Isn't Enough

A broad creative community is sustaining and necessary. The workshops, the guilds, the online groups, the conferences. All of it matters.

But there's a difference between being known generally and being known specifically. A large community knows you as a creative person. A mastermind circle knows your particular project, your particular voice, your particular way of approaching a problem. They also know it well enough to meet you exactly where you are when you're stuck.

Anyone can offer encouragement, though. A true brainstorming partner offers insight. And that's far more valuable.

• They can stand at a distance and say, I think the problem is here, and here's why.
• They can ask the single question that reorients everything.
• They can remind you of what you said about your project at the beginning, before you lost the thread, and help you find your way back.

That's what I used to have in the early years of my writing career. Then, through a series of unforeseen circumstances and betrayals, I lost it all. It wasn't until recently that I realized just how deeply the impact affected me.

For years, I struggled to maintain the writing pace and the engagement I had established. With each passing month, the community, the interest, and the support dwindled, until no one even knew I was an author anymore. My days got consumed by reacting to life instead of planning it. I ended up living day to day, without much of a plan, reacting to the immediate without any intentionality or progress toward my goals.

Eventually, I started believing that what I did didn't matter to anyone, because no one was reaching out. No one was asking when my next book was releasing or about any current projects. And instead of squaring my shoulders and first *being* the engagement I needed, I watched life happen all around me. Watched others enjoying and celebrating the community and support they had found. All the while, feeling like an outsider and trying to find my place again.

How to Find The Community You Need

Of course, these relationships develop slowly and can't be forced. For someone like me who tends to move at high speed with my fingers in multiple things at once, it's not exactly what I want to hear. But I need to listen, regardless. I need to rebuild....on several levels. And this is how:

• Start in community.
• Pay attention to who asks good questions.
• Watch those who engage with specificity and care.
• Look for those who shows up consistently.
• Find those who demonstrates genuine interest in other people's work.

Those are the people in whom you want to invest more deeply. And when you're ready to invest your time or attention:

• Be willing to offer before you ask.
• Show up for someone else's creative process before you need them to show up for yours.

The relationships that grow into real brainstorming partnerships almost always begin with you giving first. You need to extend generosity without any expectation of immediate return. And while I've spent years sowing into others, my giving always came with hope attached to it. Hope that someone would return the favor.

It's definitely a fine line to walk, as you ARE hoping to form relationships, but you don't want that to be the condition of your generosity.

I'm definitely still learning. Even though I'm quite outgoing and help others smile when they see me, the intimacy of those sustained and mutually beneficial or rewarding relationships still eludes me...even at nearly 50 years old.

Just remember. Your brainstorming circle doesn't have to be made up of people who do exactly what you do. A novelist and a visual artist and a musician can form a deeply effective creative circle if they share the qualities that matter:

• Curiosity
• Honesty
• Genuine investment in each other's work

The medium is less important than the mindset. Your ideas and passions deserve that kind of company. And so do you.

Have you found the people who understand how your creative mind works? Who can meet you in the middle of a stuck project and help you find your way through? How did you find them, and what has that relationship made possible? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Find Your People: Why Community Changes Everything

Writing is solitary work.

A story gets built inside one person's imagination, transferred through one person's hands, shaped by one person's understanding of character and language and what makes a scene feel true. No one can do that part for you, and no one should try. The solitude is where the work actually happens.

But that solitude is sustainable only when it's held inside a larger community. The writers who last are almost never the ones who go it entirely alone.

I know this from experience, both kinds. I know what it feels like to be connected to a community of people who understand this work from the inside, and I know what it feels like when that connection frays or goes quiet. The difference is not subtle. It's part of what led to my period of silence and lack of new releases.

What ACFW Gave Me

I've been part of American Christian Fiction Writers almost since it began, and the organization has shaped my career in ways I'm still discovering.

The most obvious gift is access to editors, agents, craft education, and the broader ecosystem of Christian publishing. But what has mattered more, in the long run, is the relationships. The authors I've met through ACFW who have become genuine friends. The ones who understand without explanation what it means to be in the middle of a difficult manuscript, or to receive a disappointing editorial letter, or to watch a book release into the world and wonder whether it found the readers it was meant for.

There's a particular relief in being known by people who share the specific aspects of your experience. It doesn't require as much explanation. You can say certain things about the loneliness of a long project, about the doubt that lives alongside the work, about the strange grief of finishing a book, and be understood immediately, without having to first explain why those things are hard.

I never want to take that kind of community for granted.

Why Community Matters More Than You'd Think

Writing community doesn't have to be formal or large to be real. Some of the most sustaining connections I've had in this work have been a single author friend who checks in during a hard stretch, who celebrates a win, who tells you the truth about my work and encourages me.

The authors who have been that for me are among the people I value most in my professional life. And I try, imperfectly and consistently, to be that for others.

Creative isolation is a danger. And you often don't see it until it's already a problem.

You can go a long time producing work without meaningful community and not fully realize what's missing until you find it again. Until you're in a room full of people who understand the work you do and feel something loosen in your chest that you didn't know had been tight. That happened to me. It's part of why the long season away was as hard as it was, and part of why returning to community has been as restorative as returning to the writing itself.

If you're a writer reading this and you've been going it alone, find your people. It will change things in ways you can't fully anticipate from where you're standing. The work is yours alone to do. But you don't have to do it in isolation.

Have you found your community, or are you still looking? What has connection with other creative people meant to you? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

The Fairy Tale That Wouldn't Leave Me Alone

How Magic of the Swan came to be. Some stories arrive quietly and wait to be noticed. Others show up and simply refuse to leave until you do something about them.

Magic of the Swan was the second kind.

The idea of retelling Swan Lake had been sitting in the back of my mind for longer than I can remember. Other author colleagues had done fairy tale retellings, and I always thought it would be fun to attempt one of my own. Fairy tales use the extraordinary to illuminate something deeply ordinary about human experience. But Swan Lake specifically kept returning. Something in the bones of that story — the transformation, the curse, the love that is tested by deception, the question of whether devotion is enough to break what darkness has done — wouldn't let me set it down.

Why Swan Lake

There are more familiar fairy tales I could have chosen. Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Snow White. They've all been retold so many times they've become a genre unto themselves. Swan Lake is less traveled territory in fiction, which was part of the appeal. There was more room to make it genuinely my own.

But it was also the specific emotional architecture of the story that drew me. The curse at the center of Swan Lake is a distortion. It makes the true thing appear false and the false thing appear true, and the one who loves Odette has to find a way to see through that distortion and choose rightly in a moment when everything conspires against him doing so. That's not limited to fairy tales. Human nature has to grapple with that all the time. It's also a deeply theological struggle, if you're inclined to read it that way.

Why the Gilded Age

Or a little bit after. Setting the story in the Gilded Age felt right almost immediately.

The early twentieth century in America had a gilded appeal in and of itself. Glittering on the surface, complicated and sometimes dark underneath. The wealth and the beauty and the elaborate social performance of that era sit alongside labor exploitation and stark inequality in ways that create natural dramatic tension. It's a world where appearance and reality are frequently at odds, which made it a fitting home for a story about a curse that makes the true thing look false.

It also gave me rich historical territory to research, which, as I've mentioned before on this blog, is one of my genuine pleasures as a writer. The Gilded Age has texture and specifics I absolutely love and find fascinating.

The Book Launch

After the long season away from fiction, after everything the hiatus cost and required, putting a new novel into the world was an act of faith in the most personal sense of that phrase. Faith that the work still mattered, that the stories were still worth telling, that the return was real and not temporary.

The response from readers has been amazing. But holding the book in my hands proved the voice was still there, the stories hadn't gone anywhere, and the fairy tale that wouldn't leave me alone had been worth following all the way to the end.

I have a feeling these fairy tales won't leave me alone.

Is there a fairy tale or classic story that has always felt like it was trying to tell you something specific? One that stays with you or keeps coming back? I'd love to hear which one and why in the comments.

Writing for Hire: What Freelance Writing Taught Me

Not every word I write belongs to a novel.

This is something readers don't always know about authors, particularly authors who are building or rebuilding a career. The writing life frequently involves a significant amount of work that never carries your name on the cover, that pays the practical bills while the creative work takes the longer road it always takes.

I do freelance content writing. Blog posts, articles, web copy. All produced for clients across a range of industries, in voices that are not my own, on topics that have nothing to do with historical fiction or faith or the particular world I build when I'm working on a manuscript. It's professional, it's deadline-driven, and it requires a different set of skills than novel writing does.

It has also, unexpectedly, taught me things about my own voice that I'm not sure I would have learned any other way.

What Freelance Writing Actually Looks Like

The practical reality is this: content writing pays consistently in a way that novel royalties do not.

Publishing is often a slow-moving financial ecosystem. Books take years from concept to release, royalties arrive on a delayed schedule, and advances are earned out over time. For a writer who is also running a household, homeschooling teenagers, and maintaining a platform, the gap between what the creative work produces and what daily life requires has to be filled somehow.

Freelance content writing fills that gap. It's not glamorous, and it doesn't scratch the same creative itch that fiction does, but it's honest work that uses the skills I have. I've made peace with that trade-off now, but it definitely took much longer than it should have.

What It Taught Me About Voice

But there was an unexpected gift in this part of my writing career that I didn't like at first. Writing in other people's voices made me better understand my own.

The time I've spent deliberately adjusting tone, vocabulary, sentence rhythm, and level of formality to match a client's brand and audience, has heightened my awareness of how those elements function. I started to notice the choices I'd make consciously that I used to make by instinct. And when I returned to my own work after a stretch of client writing, my own voice feels distinct in a way it didn't before. More recognizable. More deliberate.

It's the rhythm of my sentences. The way I move between the specific and the reflective. The place where warmth lives in my prose and how I find it when I've temporarily lost it. Freelance writing gave me that awareness, and that's made me a more intentional novelist.

Maintaining Balance

Now, there are seasons when the freelance load has been heavy enough that returning to my manuscripts feels harder than it should. It's as if the writing muscles have been used all day for someone else's purposes and have nothing left for my own. Learning to protect the creative work, to treat the novel as a priority even when the client deadlines are louder, has been an ongoing discipline.

I don't always get that balance right. But I keep returning to it, because the freelance work funds the life that makes the fiction possible.

Do you do creative work alongside other work that pays the bills? How do you protect the thing that matters most when everything else is making noise? I'd love to hear how you navigate it in the comments.

Writing Between the Lessons: Homeschooling and the Creative Life

Most mornings in our house, the school day and the writing day start at roughly the same time. But this isn't as harmonious as it sounds.

I've been homeschooling my teenagers for years now, which means that the person responsible for their education and the person trying to finish a novel are the same person, working in the same house, often at the same hours, with competing demands that don't particularly care about each other's schedules. It's a balancing act I chose deliberately and would choose again. It's also, on certain days, genuinely exhausting.

One of the things I've committed to on this blog is telling the truth about what the writing life actually looks like. And the truth is that mine looks like this.

What Homeschooling Takes From the Writing

The most obvious cost is time. Hours that might otherwise go to a manuscript go to lesson planning, teaching, and the general orchestration of another human being's educational life. Writing sessions get interrupted. Creative momentum, which is a fragile thing under the best of circumstances, gets broken by the real and legitimate needs of real people who are more important than any manuscript.

I've had to make peace with a slower pace of production than I might otherwise maintain. Books take longer. The gaps between projects stretch out. There are days when I sit down to write with whatever is left after everything else has been handled, and what's left is not always much.

I've had to learn to write in smaller windows than I'd like, to pick up a scene in the middle and find my way back into it quickly, to treat fifteen good minutes as worth having even when I'd prefer three uninterrupted hours.

What Homeschooling Gives Back

However, homeschooling has made me a better observer.

Teaching requires you to explain things you've understood for so long that you stopped noticing how they work. It requires patience with the process of learning, attention to how understanding actually develops, and a willingness to meet someone exactly where they are rather than where you wish they were. Those are good skills for a novelist to practice.

I've also found that the conversations that happen naturally in a homeschool environment (all the tangents and the questions and the moments when a history lesson turns into a two-hour discussion about human nature and the way things change) feed the part of me that writes.

My teenagers are interesting people with sharp minds and genuine opinions, and spending serious time with them has given me more insight into how people actually think and talk and process the world than I could have gotten any other way.

What Holds It Together

Honestly? Faith and flexibility, in roughly equal measure.

The faith piece is straightforward. I firmly believe this is the right choice for our family in this season, and that conviction steadies me on the days when the balance feels impossible. The flexibility piece is harder won. It means releasing the idea of a perfect writing day and finding genuine gratitude for the imperfect one. It means accepting that this chapter of life will eventually look different, and that the constraints of right now are not permanent.

In the meantime, I write between the lessons. Sometimes in the twenty minutes before the next subject starts, in the hour after everyone has gone to their own work for the afternoon, or the wee hours of the late night after everyone's in bed.

It's not the writing life I imagined when I started, but it might be better, actually, for being so thoroughly rooted in the real one.

How do you manage the creative work alongside everything else life requires of you? I'd love to hear what your balance looks like in the comments.

Three Names, One Writer: Published Under Different Names

If you've gone looking for my books and been confused by the author name situation, you're not alone.

I've published under three names over the course of my career. Amber Miller came first. Then Amber Stockton. Now Tiffany Amber Stockton. Same writer, same heart, same stories. Just a name that has evolved alongside everything else.

I might eventually drop my middle name, but for now, it stays. Still, it gives credence to one of my favorite quotes: "Writing is the only socially acceptable form of schizophrenia." :)

How It Started

When I published my first novels, I wrote as Amber Miller. It was my middle name combined with my maiden name, and it appeared on my earliest books in Christian historical romance. I felt it had an easy, smooth sound to it. A little less clunky than Tiffany Miller.

Then, I married my husband Stuart and began publishing as Amber Stockton, which lasted for the majority of my writing career to this point. Eventually, I realized I rarely introduce myself as Amber, and a lot of folks who met me weren't making the connection.

That led to me using my full name of Tiffany Amber Stockton. That's what I use for fiction now, although there are some nonfiction pieces with just first and last name, and if you search under any of them, you will find me and my books. My full name is on the cover of my most recent work, including Magic of the Swan, which released last month.

The Costs of Changing a Name

The publishing industry doesn't often warn you about the impact of changing your name mid-stride.

Readers who loved your earlier books under one name don't automatically find you under the next one. Search results fragment. Confusion occurs. A reader who picks up a book by Tiffany Amber Stockton may have no idea that the same woman wrote the Amber Miller titles from years ago. Building a readership is slow, careful work under the best of circumstances, and a name change can reset parts of it that take years to repair.

It took a bit of time and perseverance, reaching out to multiple databases and author support interfaces, but I finally managed to merge all 3 of my names online. The changes and the long season away and the return still fit. Even though it wasn't my intention in any way, I'm no longer hiding behind a partial name or a professional abbreviation. I'm simply showing up as the whole person.

If you find a book by Amber Miller or Amber Stockton on a shelf somewhere and you enjoy my writing, that's mine too. The voice is the same even when the name on the cover isn't. I'm still the same writer I was when this started. I've just grown a bit, and my name has grown with me.

Have you ever gone through a season where you felt like you were still becoming who you were meant to be? Where the outside finally caught up with the inside? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

The Day Someone Told Me I Should Write a Book

I didn't set out to be a novelist.

That probably surprises people who know me now, given that I've spent more than two decades writing fiction and have over twenty-five published books to my name. The writing life I have today didn't begin with a lifelong dream or a carefully laid plan. It actually began with a conversation through letters and then emails.

I'd been exchanging both with a favorite author for several years. Her name is Tracie Peterson. If you read Christian fiction, you probably know her. She's one of the most prolific and beloved authors the genre has produced, with a body of work that spans decades and touches readers all over the world.

In 2001, she suggested I join a writer's organization. Despite repeatedly saying, "I'm not a writer," she continued to encourage. So, I did. That led to me attending my first writer's conference in 2002, and we finally met face-to-face. Through a few other email exchanges, I ended up sending her something I'd written, and she shared it with her husband.

At the time, they were acquisitions editors for Barbour Publishing, and they were looking for new authors. Of course, they didn't tell me that! But she saw something in me that I didn't see in myself, and she kept gently pushing.

Even though I had no idea what I was doing, her and her husband's encouragement and recommendation to the publisher eventually led to my first book contract in 2006! Just a few weeks after I turned 30, I sold my first book.

Looking back now, it's amazing to recall what that moment set in motion.

What It Feels Like to Be Seen

There is a particular kind of gift that comes when someone with more experience than you looks at who you are and what you're capable of and speaks it out loud before you've fully seen it yourself.

It's different from a compliment. A compliment is pleasant and often forgotten by the end of the day. This was something else. This was someone whose opinion carried weight, who had nothing to gain from encouraging me, choosing to invest a moment of genuine attention and tell me something true about myself that I hadn't yet claimed.

Writing that book wasn't easy, and it required more learning than I anticipated, which is true of most things worth doing. I made lots of mistakes, and another author friend Linda Windsor, made my manuscript bleed with red revisions. I revised more than I anticipated, but I got it done.

After that contract, I sold another book. And then another. And another, ongoing for the next 12 years.

Looking back now, across more than 25 books and over 600,000 copies in print, I can trace a fairly straight line from those conversations to everything that followed. Tracie said a true thing out loud at the right moment, and that was enough to motivate me.

What This Taught Me About Encouragement

I think about that conversation when I'm around writers who are earlier in the journey than I am now.

I think about how it cost Tracie nothing to say what she said, except a moment of attention and the willingness to speak. Yet, look what it produced in return. That's a remarkable exchange. And it makes me want to be someone who does the same for others, who pays enough attention to see what someone is capable of and says so, who doesn't assume they already know or that someone else will tell them.

Words spoken with genuine intention carry weight that lasts. I know this from a conversation in 2001 that I have never forgotten and never will.

If someone in your life needs to hear what you can see in them, tell them. You may not know for years — or ever — what it sets in motion.

Has there been a person in your life who said something over you that changed your direction? Someone who saw something in you before you saw it yourself? I'd love to hear about them in the comments.

The Books That Made Me a Writer

Before I ever wrote a word of fiction, I was a reader.

From very early on, books were the place I went to understand the world, to find language for things I felt but couldn't articulate, to inhabit lives different from my own, to discover that the particular loneliness or longing or wondering I carried was not unique to me but had been felt by others and written down. It made the struggles of my real life a bit more survivable.

That kind of reading leaves marks. The books that found me long before I knew I was a writer planted something that took years to fully surface. When I finally sat down to write fiction of my own, those early stories were already in the foundation whether I knew it or not.

Reading is the Life

I was a voracious reader as a child. If anyone needed to find me, I was probably reading or telling stories and captivating whatever audience I could find, even if that audience consisted of Barbie dolls and stuffed animals. My mother once said I was completely content playing and doing things solo as long as someone else was in the room with me. Guess that's how I can hone in on my writing in the middle of a crowded coffee shop as I sip my tea.

I gravitated early toward stories with strong emotional cores. Books where the characters felt genuinely real and the stakes were high and the resolution was earned rather than convenient. I had little patience even then for stories that didn't make me feel something. Even though I read to escape reality, I still wanted to be inside the story, not observing it from a careful distance.

The books that accomplished that for me became the standard I used to measure everything else. Even though I didn't know it at the time, I was actually developing a sense of craft. And I thought I was just reading. But every story that moved me was teaching me something about what fiction can do when it's working at full capacity. The stories that left me unmoved were teaching me something too.

What Historical Fiction Gave Me

My deep love of historical fiction developed early and has never left. Even though I've shifted some to contemporary stories, there's still a small-town, coziness reminiscent of historical timeframes that's evident.

There is something about a story set in another time that satisfies the desire to understand how people lived and loved and made meaning in circumstances entirely unlike our own, to find the thread of common humanity running through the distance of years and different worlds. A well-researched historical novel makes the past feel not so distant. And it brings to the past to life in a way no history book ever will.

That's what drew me to writing historical fiction eventually. I wanted to know the WHY behind the WHO and the WHAT and the WHEN covered in history class. And I wanted to build those worlds myself. To do the research and find the details and construct a place and time that invited a reader into that world.

What Faith-Infused Stories Gave Me

The books that shaped me most deeply were ones where faith was present in the way it's present in real life. Not announced or imposed, but woven into how the characters understood themselves and their world. This is known as a Christian worldview.

Those stories gave me permission to write the same way. They showed me that a novel could be thoroughly grounded in Christian conviction without becoming a sermon. That the truest expression of faith in fiction is often the quietest one. I absorbed that lesson as a reader long before I could have ever articulated it as a writer.

When I finally sat down to write my own stories, I was drawing on all of the emotional honesty, the historical grounding, the faith woven quietly into the foundation. Without even realizing it, the books that made me a reader had already made me a writer.

What books shaped you along your life's journey? Is there a story from your earlier years that planted something that's still growing? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

The Research That Never Made the Page

For every detail that ends up in a finished novel, there are probably a dozen that didn't.

I research thoroughly, sometimes to a degree that goes well beyond what the story actually requires. It's all to understand the world my characters inhabit from the inside.

• The way people spoke
• The rhythms of daily life
• The particular texture of a place and time
  

That kind of understanding requires far more knowledge than will ever appear on the page. Most of it is invisible to the reader but all of it impacts how the story feels. Unknown or uncommon facts are one of my favorite things about research discovery.

• Fascinating historical details
• Pieces of local lore
• Unexpected connections between two things I didn't know were related
• Things that simply don't fit the story I'm telling

I write them all down anyway. They go into a folder that has never stopped growing. Somehow, they'll find their way into a future manuscript. Nothing is ever wasted!

The Scenes That Got Cut

Cutting a scene you worked hard on is one of the quieter griefs of novel writing. No one except me and maybe my editor or critique partner knows it happened.

But there are scenes in every manuscript I've written that I genuinely mourned losing. Moments between characters that felt real and true and earned, that simply didn't serve the larger shape of the story well enough to stay. A scene can be well-written and still be wrong for the book.

I keep those scenes, though. In a folder, just like the unused research. I may or may not use them, but I can't quite bring myself to delete them either. They're part of the story even if they're not in it.

The Long Road Between First Word and Finished Book

What you hold in your hand as a reader represents years, sometimes, from the first stirring of an idea to the day the book exists in the world.

Every book's journey involves:

• Writing and revising
• More revising
• Conversations with editors about what the story needs to become
• Cover designs
• Marketing decisions
• Endorsements to gather
• A release date that needs careful preparation

By the time a book reaches a reader, the author has usually been living with it so long that reading it feels like visiting a place you moved away from years ago. It's familiar in a way that's almost strange.

That long road is why a reader's response matters so much. The letters. The messages. The moments when someone finds me at an event or reaches out online to say that a particular character or scene met them somewhere real. Those moments close a loop that started quietly, alone, at a desk somewhere, with nothing but an idea and the hope that it might become something worth a reader's time.

It did. You're holding the proof of it.

Is there something you've ever wondered about what happens before a book reaches your hands? A part of the process you've been curious about? Ask me in the comments. I'll be happy to pull back the curtain a little further.

Why I Keep Coming Back to The Second Chances Theme

If you've read more than one of my novels, you've probably noticed something.

Second chances show up everywhere in my fiction. The relationship that fractured years ago and finds its way back toward something whole. The person who walked away from their faith and slowly, painfully finds their footing again. The character who made a defining mistake and has to decide whether they're allowed to want something good after it.

I return to these stories the way you return to a particular stretch of shoreline. Even though you've been there before, it keeps having something to say. I've thought about why, and the answer really isn't all that complicated. It's just honest.

Because I Believe in Them

Second chances aren't a narrative device to me. They're a theological conviction.

I believe, in the deepest and most personal way, that no one is ever too far gone. That grace is not reserved for people who haven't made a significant mess of things. That redemption is available in the places that seem least likely to produce it, in the relationships that seem most beyond repair, in the seasons of a life that feel most irretrievably lost.

That's not wishful thinking. It's the core of what my faith tells me about how the world actually works. And because story is how I process what I believe, those convictions find their way onto the page whether I plan them there or not.

Because Life Keeps Proving It

I've also lived long enough to see second chances happen in real life. That makes them much easier to write in a convincing manner

I've watched people rebuild after the kind of loss that looked impossible to survive. I've seen relationships find their way back from fractures that seemed permanent. I've experienced my own version of returning to something I thought was behind me, including this blog and my fiction writing itself after a long season when both went quiet.

That personal experience matters when you're writing about something. There's a difference between writing a second chance story from the outside, as a pleasing narrative arc, and writing one from the inside, as someone who knows what it actually costs to try again.

And it does cost something. It requires a particular kind of courage that isn't dramatic or loud but is real and ongoing and sometimes exhausting. I try to honor that in my characters rather than smooth it over.

What These Stories Ask of a Reader

Here's what I've noticed about readers who connect most deeply with second chance stories: they're usually carrying one of their own.

Not always a romance, obviously. But something. A relationship they're not sure is repairable. A dream they set down years ago and aren't sure they're allowed to pick back up. A version of themselves they'd like to find their way back to. When those readers find a character navigating the same territory, something happens that goes beyond entertainment. The story becomes a kind of permission. A quiet reminder that the door isn't necessarily closed just because it's been shut for a while.

That's the thing about second chance stories done honestly — they don't promise easy outcomes. The characters earn their way back to something, slowly and imperfectly, and the reader feels every step of it. But the destination they're moving toward is real and it's worth it and it's available.

I keep coming back to that story because I keep believing that's true.

Have you ever had a second chance at something you thought was behind you? A relationship, a dream, a version of yourself? What did it feel like to step back into it? I'd love to hear your story in the comments.

How I Name My Characters (And Why It Matters)

Names have weight.

I don't think most people realize how much until they try to change one that has already settled into place. There's a particular kind of wrongness that happens when a character's name doesn't fit. A low-grade friction that follows you through every scene, every line of dialogue, every moment where you type that name and something in the back of your mind quietly objects.

When the name is right, you don't notice it at all. It just disappears into the character, the way a good pair of glasses disappears when you're actually looking at the world through them rather than at them. That's the aim of every author.

Getting there, though, is its own process.

Where the Search Begins

I rarely arrive at a character's name quickly. Oh, I might start with a name to get the story rolling, but those names often change before the book comes to an end. Usually the character exists for a while before the name does. I might even throw in a placeholder of sorts while the rest flows. A presence, a voice, a set of tendencies and wounds and desires that feel real before they have anything to be called.

During that nameless stretch I pay attention differently. Noticing names the way you notice a color when you're trying to decide whether it belongs in a room. A name will catch my attention in a completely unrelated context. It might be a historical record, a passing conversation, or even the credits rolling at the end of a film. Yes, I'm one of those who sits until the very end. But something will shift.

That's not how it always happens, though. Sometimes, a name will land and I'll know immediately that it belongs to the person I've been trying to find.

Other times I go looking deliberately. I keep a list of names I've encountered and liked but haven't yet used. I research naming conventions for the time period and region or contemporary setting I'm usingn to write the story, because a name that belongs to a character's world matters as much as one that belongs to their personality. A woman living on the Virginia coast in the early twentieth century is not going to be named something that sounds like it belongs in a contemporary Manhattan apartment, and if she is, there needs to be a specific reason. And the story needs to earn it.

What a Name Has to Do

A character's name is doing more work than you might think.

It's the first impression a reader has of a person before they know anything else about them. It carries sound and rhythm that affect how a reader experiences every scene where that character appears. It can signal something about the origin of a character, what era they inhabit, what kind of family shaped them. And in dialogue especially, the way other characters use a name becomes a tool for showing relationship and tension without having to explain either one directly. Whether they shorten it, avoid it, or use it pointedly in a moment of conflict 

Names also sometimes unlock something about a character I hadn't consciously known. There have been moments where I tried three or four names that were all technically fine. Then, I landed on the right one and suddenly understood something about the character I hadn't been able to articulate before. As if the name was the last piece that gave everything else clarity.

That probably sounds strange. It makes complete sense to me.

The Names That Didn't Work

I've changed character names mid-manuscript more times than I care to admit. Usually it happens when I realize somewhere around chapter four or five that the name I chose in the planning stage was just who I hoped the character would be rather than who they actually turned out to be once the story started breathing.

Characters have a way of becoming themselves despite your best intentions, and sometimes the name you gave them at the beginning no longer fits the person who showed up on the page. When that happens, there's nothing to do but change it and do a thorough find-and-replace and hope you didn't miss any. Which reminds me, I have a comical story (now) about this:

In one of my earlier book series, I reached the Net Galley phase of the editing process. This is the time to find any overlooked spelling mistakes or grammatical errors. It's not for major substantial edits. Well, in my review, I realized I had 2 completely different very minor characters in similar roles who had the same name.

So, I made note of the pages where the 2nd character appeared at the end of the novel. That, along with a couple other spelling catches went to my publisher for final changes. I specifically stated what needed to happen for that character. Isolate those exact pages, and change the name "Mary" to "Laura." Simple enough. Right?

Obviously not. And I had no idea of the mistake until I received reader email and letters asking what "prilaura" was.

It took me a few minutes to process, but thankfully, one of my readers cited the page number. Anxiously flipping to the page, I found the error. But sadly, it wasn't just that one. My book also had the odd words of "custolaura" and the scent of "roselaura."

Ugh! Instead of limiting the find/replace command to the 7 specified pages of a single chapter at the end of the book, the person who oversaw the galley changes had done a global search & replace and also forgot to capitalize the names. So, anywhere the string of letters m-a-r-y appeared in any word or name, they were replaced with l-a-u-r-a. And there were over 20,000 copies that went to print like this!

After notifying my publisher and replying to that handful of early readers, then sitting in anguish over this glaring mistake that couldn't be fixed, I realized I could get angry, or I could find the fun in it. I chose the fun.

So, I sent out a newsletter challenging readers to find the mistakes and report back. Each one who did was entered into a drawing for 1 of 5 different prize baskets containing not only a copy of this "rare" book, but also a copy of the other 2 books in the series, some herbal tea, a coffee cup, bookmark, and a magnifying glass to honor the sleuths.

If you'd like to join the fun, pick up a copy of Bound by Grace anywhere you can find it and look for yourself. :)

I never mind the extra work. A name that fits is worth the trouble of finding it.

Do you have a name that you've always thought sounded like it belonged in a story? Maybe your own, or someone close to you. I'd love to hear it in the comments.

The Writing Life Nobody Talks About

There's a version of the writing life that looks very appealing from the outside.

The author at a sun-filled desk, hot tea steaming nearby, words flowing onto the page with quiet purpose. Book covers lined up on the wall and a copy of each published book on a shelf behind them. A calendar marked with signing events and speaking engagements and the occasional literary lunch. It's a tidy little picture. It's also only about 10% of the actual experience.

The rest of it is something else entirely. They're the parts that don't make it into the author bio or the back flap photo, but they're every bit as important.

I've been writing novels for over two decades now and have more than 25 published books, with well over a half-million copies in print. And I can tell you with complete honesty that the writing life has been one of the most rewarding, most frustrating, most humbling, most surprising experiences of my entire existence. Sometimes all four of those things in the same afternoon!

The Long Silences

What nobody tells you about publishing a book is how much waiting is involved.

You write the manuscript, which takes months, sometimes longer. Then you wait to hear back from your editor. Then you revise, and wait again. Then the book goes into production, and you wait some more. By the time the book is actually in a reader's hands, you have often been living with that story for the better part of two years. You know every scene, every character beat, every line of dialogue so well that you can barely read it anymore with any objectivity at all.

And then the book releases, and the world moves on to the next thing fairly quickly, and you are already supposed to be well into writing the next one.

There are also the longer silences. The seasons when the books stop coming because life demanded something else of you. I've written about my own long season away from fiction before, and the complicated feelings that came with it. What I'll add here is the silence doesn't mean the writer in you has gone anywhere. It's just waiting for the conditions to change. And eventually, they do.

The Doubt That Doesn't Announce Itself

If you talk to any author or watch interviews that dig a little deeper into the less public side of a writer's life, you'll hear us admit that doubt is a near-constant companion in this work.

This isn't the kind that makes for a good story at a conference panel. No, this is the quiet, persistent, everyday kind. The manuscript that felt promising three weeks ago now feels flat and unconvincing. The scene you revised four times still isn't right and you're not sure it ever will be. The book you poured yourself into sits on a shelf somewhere, and you have no way of knowing whether it reached the person who needed it or just took up space and is now collecting dust.

Unfortunately, that kind of doubt doesn't resolve cleanly. It's just part of the landscape. You learn to write alongside it rather than waiting for it to go away, because to be honest? It never really goes away. You just get better at not letting it in the driver's seat.

The Joy That's Harder to Explain

Now, just to make sure I'm not all Debbie-downer today, I'll wrap up with the good stuff, even if it's something non-writers might struggle to understand.

There is something that happens when a story finally comes together. When a scene clicks into place, when a character does something that surprises you, when you read back a paragraph and think, yes, that's exactly right! It's a bit challenging to describe that to someone who hasn't experienced it, though. I see it something like discovery and realization. Like you've managed to catch something true and hold it still long enough to put it on the page.

That feeling is why the doubt doesn't win. It's why the long silences eventually end. It's why, after the waiting and the uncertainty and the seasons when the words wouldn't come, I sat back down and started writing again.

Oh, and every now and then, I also get letters. Not often anymore, but often enough. A reader who found something in one of my stories that met them in the middle of something hard. A note from someone who says a particular character helped them understand something about themselves that no one else had articulated. Those letters remind me that the work isn't just for me. That the long hours and the quiet doubt and the waiting are part of something that matters beyond the shelf life of any single book.

The writing life is harder than it looks. But despite all the craziness? I wouldn't trade a single bit of it.

What's something about your own work or creative life that looks different from the outside than it feels on the inside? I'd love to hear what's behind the curtain for you in the comments.